


Chiaroscuro

by Ilral



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Experimental, Gen, POV Second Person, inhuman perspective, seriously too many fire and light metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-05
Updated: 2017-03-05
Packaged: 2018-09-28 10:44:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10093757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilral/pseuds/Ilral
Summary: To the crew, Slepinope is a monster of the highest order. But to them, to you, things are a little different.





	

 

You place the hand against a patch of water-smoothed rock. Your vision seems doubled, as it has for days now. Your mind, you suspect, is not used to seeing through eyes after nine decades of viewing the Truth. In Truth, both the rock and the hand seem like afterimages. With some effort, you push it deeply into the illusory rock. Gray fragments spray across the cave floor. A few prick the hide on your body, but the pain is merely reported to you, not felt.

The memory of pain was almost gone from your mind. You’d learned early to stay out of the False light outside of the hospital. Traveling in the glow of those humans had protected you from it. Their glow had also dulled the pain of those… runes? Those had hurt. Not as much as the flare, though. Your surface still aches, like a sunburn. Trails of black vapor leaking out of it cast long shadows around you, which the ghosts carefully avoid.

You keep digging deeper into the cave with these hands, resisting the urge to return to that place even now. It’s so cold out here, among the bugs and beasts. Their souls barely flicker. It’s easier to see without that light now that you’ve found these eyes. The cave gradually gains a floor of gravel and grit as you carve deeper into the rock. Your new form can walk in the False light, though it protests and weakens as you push it further, but the ghosts need a shelter. 

Another memory. The other ghosts clustered around you in the hospital as you awoke above your own fading body. You don’t know what they saw--you were the very last to die, the very last to be born. The new body can work on its own for now. You whittle away the hours til sunset with an old pastime: trying to remember your first life. As always, the memories are fleeting. The light sticks in your mind the most this time. 

Back then, you couldn’t see the Truth. You remember letting shafts of False light fall on you through the windows of a train as you talked to… a woman? A flicker of a more recent memory--red hair under your hand. You clear your mind, trying to recall another memory. More light, not False or True but simply light, cast by coals across her face. Who is this woman? A wife? A daughter? No, there’s no feelings like that in these memories. 

The sun is sinking below the horizon as you find the last memory. The same woman, with a phial of  _ something  _ in her hand. A pain in your arm, and then the Truth. This must have been the first time you saw it. She seems scared in the vision. Another recent memory, a little after the first by your reckoning. The same feeling as that  _ something _ , in among the regular detritus of the humans’ vehicle. 

You resolve to check their stores. Perhaps you could create a companion for yourself? Your old self would have wanted someone to talk to. Strangely, though, you don’t feel that it’s as important anymore. You’re more concerned with warming yourself in the humans’ light.

The ghosts follow you dumbly as you leave the cave. You push them back with a spectral arm--their time will come to warm their tired souls. Not tonight, though, tonight you are going it alone. The humans are still attached to their False light, but a few of them can see the Truth, if only while sleeping. More importantly, they can see  _ you _ . They’ve never hesitated to set their beasts upon you since that first, beautiful, meeting. How greedy they were, and still are! Hoarding the true light to themselves, as if any being could live in the dark.

Even before the humans arrived, you’d resolved to care for the ghosts. It was a point of pride now, a way to separate yourself from them. The humans warred with each other constantly. Even now, as you draw up upon their vehicle, you can feel the discord radiating out from inside. 

You slip out of the body. Its guttering light pales in comparison to the blaze of the humans, anyway. It slumps aside, comatose, and you seep through the wall. The ghosts are foolish and greedy. If you’d brought them with you, they’d have swarmed all over the humans like flies on honey. The mages would have been awakened, they’d have summoned their beasts, and you’d have gained a new scar. No, the ghosts would have to subsist on the residual warmth you carried back to them nightly. 

The glowing of the human souls washes over you, almost too bright to withstand. You forget the woman, the phials, the stores in that moment. This warmth is all that matters. A hand twitches underneath you and the smaller blond human begins moaning. You quickly retract the tendril that had crept towards them without your permission. It wouldn’t do to smother their light all at once. A bounty like this needed to be savored.

Enough comfort. The mages have no doubt already noticed your presence, and begun preparing their response. You make for the rear of the sleeping area. The steel wall is False, and your True form passes through it like air. You can still see the light of the humans illuminating the area around you. There’s a human in here too, smaller and grayer. A female, you think. Strange that she is kept separate from the others. 

Next to her is a crate, lying open. The woolen packing material still glimmers with light. Inside are piles upon piles of books. You pass through and among them and feel a spike of Truth. There, three deep under  _ The Abridged Atomic Rockets Collection _ , a shrink-wrapped set of syrettes. But how to retrieve them?

The little human stirs, rubbing her shoulder, as you pass over her and extend a feeler into the electric mechanism of the cargo door. The residual flows of electricity through the control circuits burn you a little as you marshal them across the bridge of a transistor. The door suddenly clanks and shudders into motion, letting in moonlight and crisp night air, and you rush out, back to the body. 

It’s fortunate that this body has hands, even if they are cold and rotting. You brush the books aside and gently grasp the package, lifting it ever-so-carefully out of the crate and holding it up as you inspect it. The little gray human shivers as the cargo compartment goes from chilly to brisk to freezing. 

You pause for a moment. This one won’t survive the night in this cold. The humans would kill you,  _ will _ kill you if you stay. But perhaps you can be a little better than them. Who knew more about being cold then you, after all? You quickly use the hands to pull the blankets up over the sleeping human. The beast turns its head, ready to leave, but something keeps you here. A feeler reaches out of its own accord and ruffles her hair. Her breath stops in her throat for a moment, and she releases a wheezing, choking sound. 

Cursing yourself for the delay, you let the legs carry you back to the cave. Setting down the package near the door, you walk the body to the back of the cave, ghosts clustering around you to feed off of the warmth left over from your brief moments with the humans. 

⚝

Tuuri woke up with a yell. The covers had been drawn up over her as she slept, and damp air blew against her face from the inexplicably open rear door. A pile of books rested against her haphazardly. There was a shock of white in her hair.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this entire fic in one night, and haven't proofread it at all. Judge as harshly as you like.


End file.
